Improve web UI prompt to activate/deploy lastest version

In the web UI, when you activate/deploy a config version, a prompt is immediately shown saying This version is inactive. Would you like to deploy it now?

This causes confusion if you’re deploying frequently to get a certain config to work, because you’re never quite sure if the version you’re looking at has changes or not.

Also, because this prompt appears after the page content loads, the entire UI keeps jumping as it’s shown which is highly annoying.

Please can the following be done:

when viewing an unlocked (i.e. editable) version, stop prompting to deploy unless there are changes between it and the currently active one. this implies indicating there are changes between the active and current versions.

when viewing a locked version, continue to show the existing message about being locked but being able to activate - potentially change the button text from Activate to something like “roll back to” so it’s clear you’re looking at an old version.

show the prompt in a way that reserves layout space so the page doesn’t jump when it shows.

Happy to discuss alternatives, these are just suggestions. But please can something be done about this.

Recently I've attempted to deploy a new version of the site (only a few lines of css changes) and the 'This version is inactive. Would you like to deploy it now?' prompt does not go away, even after clicking activate. I just keep going up in version number, the prompt pops back up, and the old version of the site keeps getting served.

When I go to the dns name directly I get the correct version of the site.

Hi Ross - To answer part of your question - when you activate a new version, the cache is not purged. You can Purge by URL or run a Purge All when changing versions as a best practice. (However, be careful with Purge All if you have a lot of traffic on your site.)

You can run a curl -svo /dev/null www.yoururlhere.com in your terminal if it appears that the old version of the site keeps getting served. Look for the results such as:

Age - How long it's been in the cache. Following a purge, this should be a low number (17 seconds right now).
X-Cache: HIT - This has previously been accessed in the cache since the last Purge or TTL expiring.

As for the "Would you like to deploy it now?" persisting, this should be fixed when our new UI launches, I'm curious if it goes away for you on a refresh? Happy to look into it if you want to send your Customer ID to support@fastly.com or can chat in IRC at https://webchat.freenode.net/.